![[no-ai-tri.png|38]] >*‘Day by day, however, the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day, we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life.’* - Samuel Butler Artificial intelligence… I’ve said before in various places that I’m extremely skeptical about a.i.. But I’ve never really put down in writing outside of criticising techbro’s for their dreams of planetary extinction to bring about their a.i.god. In law, there is the concept of adverse inference. A loose definition of which is: A concept that implies that the absence of information which can lead to negative assumptions about an individuals credibility. Isn’t this what people are doing when they accuse writers of using a.i.? We’re destroying someone’s credibility, we’re passing a judgement and we’re not even asking for evidence, or the lack thereof to be provided beforehand. And while these accusations of adverse inference can be hurled at the human creator, it goes double for so-called artificial intelligence itself. A.i. doesn’t give us sources, it’s locked down, it hallucinates, it vaccums up opinions and talks you in circles. It can’t give you the answers you want, it can only give you a statistical possbility, and that possibility might not even be real. There are several problems with artificial intelligence as an extraction engine. It sucks up the entire creative output of all of humanity and spits out slop. It might actually have been useful if: - Copyright was respected (or) - Copyright didn’t exist in the first place - Knowledge was freely accessible to all humanity - No paywalls - Was built for researchers and showed sources including whole texts instead of slop and hallucinations. But we don’t live in that world so the benefits of a.i. are extremely limited and I believe they don’t outweigh the costs. What we’re left with is an extractivist adverse inference engine that generates accusations of adverse inferences and the cycle just keeps repeating infinitely as the world burns and more and more people fall for the illusion. To add insult to injury the burdern of proof is on the creator not the corporations sucking up the entire creative output of humanity. … It has to stop. We can’t rely on tagged works, authors having to share their entire writing process, artists having to save gigabytes of videos showing how their works were made, or even guilds in the long run to protect us for slop heap that’s building.They’re havens in the storm, but if we know anything from our world it’s that sooner or later, the garbage will find a way… P.S. Alternative Acronym: A.I. Artifice Infernal, which could be defined as ‘clever device of the lower realms of hell or the dead’. I think that sums it up pretty nicely… P.P.S. In the future, I might write up a speculative piece on what A.I. could look like and how it could possibly be used for the benefit of humanity.